Africa in Stereo

Abstract

This book analyzes how Africans have engaged with African American music and its representations in the long twentieth century (1890–2011) to offer a new cultural history that attests to pan-Africanism’s ongoing and open theoretical potential. The book argues that African American popular music appealed to continental Africans as a unit of cultural prestige, a site of pleasure, and most importantly an expressive form already encoded with strategies of creative resistance to racial hegemony. Ghana, Senegal, and South Africa are considered as three distinctive sites where longstanding pan-African political and cultural affiliations gave expression to transnational black solidarity. Ghana, the first sub-Saharan British colony to gain independence, repeatedly issued calls to the black diaspora to “return” and participate in pan-African unity, and has been a primary destination for heritage tourism and grappling with slavery’s legacies. Senegal functioned similarly for the Francophone world, and Léopold Senghor’s formulation of négritude remains provocative, as demonstrated by the alternatives articulated by Senegalese and diasporan artists. Meanwhile, South Africa’s anti-apartheid struggle motivated unique forms of solidarity after the era of African independence movements with which many diasporans identified. The book shows how such transnational ties fostered expressions of what is theorized as stereomodernismalong axes counter to the colonizing process. Accounting for the specificity of various media through which music was transmitted and interpreted—poetry, novels, films, recordings, festivals, live performances and websites—stereomodernism, lies at the intersection of music, media, and solidarity, tapping music’s capacity to refresh our understanding of twentieth century black transnational ties.

The authors' abstract, as published at the source. Oxford University Press eBooks, 2014 · DOI ↗